what distortion pedal should i get?

For full-on, disgusto-fuzz, still nothing can beat the Big Muff (but it's got to be Russian.) For softer, more purring distortion, so loved by dronerock, it's got to be the MXR Distortion Plus.

Here's a clue - for sick, mad, totally out of control distortion, get yerself an MXR Blue Box - distortion with some kind of freaky harmonic thing, ring modulation or something. Totally uncontrollable, you'll rarely get the same sound twice when you want it, but the sounds it emits are beyond imagination!

Sounds like I need to check out both of those MXRs, cause both sound like they have what i'm looking for.

thanks.

http://www.zvex.com/effects.html
or
http://www.lovetone.com/

I switched to RAT recently, which is a little angrier-sounding but in the same general non-metal fat-fuzz vein.

It first showed up in the Scholz Sustainor and worked well.

I've used a variety of overdrive and fuzz pedals and basically have no gripes with any of them. The Blackstone Mosfet Overdrive gives you the EQ characteristic and distortion of an old Marshall JTM-45. It's pretty close. A Holowon Static Egg is good for 60's razor buzz fuzz by itself. If you use it with an overdriven sound, it makes the guitar cut through the mix better. A Nick Greer Black Fuzz works and sounds more like a really good FuzzFace with a silicon, not germanium, transistor.

the mxr+ distortion is a pretty good pedal, but i would get an older one if you can. i have 2 70's era ones and a newer re-issue one and the 70's ones sound a lot better to my ears - more blended, smooth and pleasant. it has more of that compressed siamese dream/mbv tone. the newer one sounds brighter and a little more 'artificial' to me. i got both of the older 70's ones for the same price that i paid for the newer one - $50.

the z-vex fuzz factories are very cool and yeah, can get very nasty as well as getting really thick compressed tone. if you got a few extra bucks, try out the z-vex fuzz probe - which IS a fuzz factory pedal w/ a built-in theremin that you can control w/ your foot. very cool! they go for around $325 i think? the fuzz factory is a really versatile pedal and i honestly do think it's worth the $225 price tag or whatever it is.

if you don't like the black box big muff, ([butthead]huhuh muff. black box. huhuhuh[/butthead]) maybe try out one of the green ones if you can find one. they sound less metallic and a lot smoother to my ears.

never cared for the rat/turbo rats - when you run them w/ everything at full, they do this weird volume cut thing on the beginning of notes like they've become too saturated and can't handle outputting that much sound. i suppose i could just turn some of the knobs down, but what's the fun in that? they sound cool for bass distortion, though!

marshall shredmaster pedals sound pretty good when you combine them w/ other pedals. i think that kevin shields did occasionally use one of these, as well as johnny greenwood. i've gotten some pretty good fuzztones running the shredmaster into an mxr+ or an ampeg scrambler or even an ibanez tubescreamer. very touchy pedal, though. you'll have to do a lot of tweaking to get usable tones - a lot of the tones sound really muddy. running it w/ another brighter pedal helps that a lot.

my favorite distortion/fuzz pedal is probably the ampeg scrambler i mentioned above. the originals go for waaay too much money, but i built a couple clones for around $50 bucks apiece. can get real nassssty by itself, really piercing. i played a show last night and ran the scrambler into the shredmaster and it sounded pretty good until the shredmaster ran out of batteries...hehe. probably not what you're looking for, but definitely cool

The mass produced one I mentioned (the vexter series) is around $160.

The mass produced one I mentioned (the vexter series) is around $160.

-- walter kranz (kranz_walte...), October 2nd, 2005.

even better!

Multi-speaker miked cabinet emulator. Originally on the Sustainor,it was a button and a slider changed the phase-cancellation pattern to give you a range of sounds approximating different mikings. It's there so you can go direct to a clean power amp, a mixing board in the studio or for the PA without miking. If you're using it was a regular mp it's probably superior to have it disengaged.

Would you say this would work with a bass guitar?

Is that like an LSD tab? Or the tab on Google that says "I Feel Lucky"?

I want to get one of those silly Death by Audio boutique distortions but I'd have to go to NYC to get it.

http://www.themusiczoo.com/bossDS1thumb.jpg

So the Colorsound Tone Bender I mentioned up thread crapped out on me during a gig. It's been increasingly flakey (entirely my fault since I abuse the hell out of it) and I'm looking to try something else out. I've got a commie olive drab Big Muff that I love, but I'm looking for something that will fill in where the BM can't. Past pedals I've used:

-Boss Distortion/Feedback (feh. sold it off on eBay)
- Yardbox (so much promise and so much failure to deliver. sold it off too)
- RAT (OK for what it does, but doesn't have any unpredictability)

So do I just get a Fuzz Factory now?

Mid-Fi Electronics Glitch Computer

http://www.midfielectronics.com/

You want unpredictable, mid-fi will def. get you there. The Random Number Generator is pretty sweet too...

The Subdecay Noise Box is pretty dope and very user friendly...

Have you checked out the 4ms stuff?

PS - I've got a Fuzz Factory you can borrow if you want to give it a try... highly interactive with gtr output, WILL oscillate like a mofo. Zoom Ultra-Fuzz is good for this too, and a bit more predictable. FF results can change with the weather (literally!).

I don't think the Glitch Computer is going to work as a more unpredictable version of a Tonebender. See these comments from HC:

<hr>
the sound quality is impossibly bad. It can totally compress or expand your input and depending on where the knobs are adjusted. Often the noise is several octaves lower than what you are playing and this can be very loud. There are incredible changes in volume with just a little movement in a knob so often I run a compressor full on after it so my amp is not damaged.If you can ignore all these problems, you will like it.

You cannot depend on it to do something twice because it cannot. When you turn it on you will almost always be suprised what it sounds like. You can depend on its unreliablity, sort of another built in feature.
<hr>
If you're spending in ZVex territory, you could also look at an Adrenalinn III. It's not a fuzztone but it can certainly deliver a fuzztone plus quite a bit more. And its sequencing/tone filtering options or so numerous they give you more than enough odd sounds.

I'd also recommend a Holowon Static Egg, because they were cheap. It's a fuzztone that on the extreme end is razory and shrill zzzzz. However, it ties into the volume knob on the guitar very tightly and by backing off, you get quite a color variance, all the way down to only a bare hint of it with a nice slow compression that doesn't squash the attack.

I just got a cheapo Blues Driver, but the Big Muff was fun--fuzz, played Alice Cooper's "Only Women Bleed" or PF's "Eclipse."

I've heard a couple of 4ms samples, but they never really held my interest because they (along with most boutique fuzz pedals) have that super-saturated short-circuiting Marshall sound that's great for when you want to sound like a swarm of insects armed with lasers but don't (to my ears) have the lower-end universe-ripping-apart sound I prefer.

Gawd what a sentence.

Zoom Ultra-Fuzz is good for this too, and a bit more predictable.

Still trying to find one. Can't believe it's discontinued.

If you're looking for lower-end universe-ripping-apart sounds, this is a good'un. I swear the devil is actually inside that box. And he sounds like he's not happy about it.

http://www.tonefactor.com/images/saultra.jpg

http://www.tonefactor.com/proddetail.php?prod=UltraLord07

Used to be available in a bigger enclosure as well, though the devil sounded just as pissed in that one. It's actually in the Fuzz Factory/Ultra Fuzz "versatile fuzz" camp, so it can also do less over-the-top stuff. But where the FF can go from cutting to searing to icepicky, the Ultra-Lord is voiced more to the low end.

Once Namm is over, if people are serious about desperate desire for Zoom Ultra-Fuzz, I will make some calls. Higher up at USA s4ms0n/z00m used to work for us, and is a good dude willing to hunt for the impossible.

some more cheapo nastiness -- danelectro french toast, from danelectro's 'mini pedal' line. 'tis a very shrill'n'nasty octave fuzz. they go for about $25 on ebay

^ yah supposed to be a direct clone of teh Foxx Tone Machine

Any opinions on the Dan Armstrong pedal reissues? Feeling itchy to buy new things for store, and I can buy in (relatively) cheap.

Another vote for the MXR Distorion+.

And the Big Muff, which I run my bass thru.

i have not given up on the zoom thing, but the guy i know had a death in the family and is currently incommunicado, so im not going to bug him about it at the moment

any tips on a pedal that might sound good on keyboards (want to try it with my old shitty casios)?

not sure about casios but my farfisa through a big muff sounds ridiculously filthy and awesome

If it's distortion you want, then you're probably tied to using some kind of stompbox, as DAW plug-ins tend to sound brittle. Aside from distortion there's a lot that you can do with plug-ins otherwise. I have a big stash of cheap thrift store Yamaha/Casio keyboards, and have got a lot of mileage out of them. Reverb and delay are obvious candidates for making a cheap keyboard sound bigger, and EQ can help a lot as well.

tried some distortion plugins on the microkorg last night and it actually sounded awesome, way better results than i got the time i tried to run a casio through a line 6 pod. would still like to mess around with stompboxes though.

A cheap distortion or overdrive should be enough for casio. I've run a Yamaha kids keyboard through by Russian Big Muff, which sounds pretty cool. But my favourite pedal to run a cheapo keyboard through is a phaser. Gives a nice analogue squelch to your notes. Add loads of fuzz, reverb and delay and you'll have all kinds of fun.

Phaser on any cheap keyboard's organ preset is pretty much instant Jarre. Last year I recorded an entire album with just a Yamaha PSS-140, and the heavy phaser effect was key.

Every time I try to play with efx over anything with an artificially generated signal, like a keyboard or drum machine, the results have always been disappointing and flat. Actually, this old roommate of mine had the craziest synth that I never really played with. He told me, "you can play 'actual music' on it, but it's tricky", and that thing took to pedals really well iirc.. wish I had monkeyed with it. Musta had the wrong stuff.

I want a distortion pedal (for guitar, not synth), but I haven't got any money. Is Behringer Super Fuzz any good? They seem to be quite cheap, around £20?

lessons learned so far:

-any kind of saw wave-based sound sounds pretty shitty when distorted, but square wave/plain electric piano sounds pretty good.

-i've been using cubase plugins to do it, and most of them don't work but just the right setting can sound convincing.

-layering an unprocessed synth part along with the distorted version sounds much more full.

Could be. What do you want out of the pedal exactly? There are video demos floating around, big nasty thing iirc. I'm meanin to collect a small troop of cheap pawnshop distortion pedals like that, dod thrash master, etc. They're fun.

That's an xpost obv.

Basically I currently have a cute little Hiwatt practice amp which has an overdrive button on it but it's just not distorted enough, I want something to make a really disgusting noisy fuzz sound. It's just for fun, I'm not in a band and can't write songs, just for rocking out on in my living room tbh.

i have recently been pretty much stunned by the new danelectro cool cat series. little, but they have a (gasp!) metal chassis and true bypass and sound shockingly good. should be $29-49 USD (not sure of the pricing overseas tho)

i am morally opposed to the behringer pedals

may I ask why?

yeah the cool cat fuzz is $39 and def worth a listen

xpost its complicated, but not only are the circuits direct rips from other current manufacturers (which is kind of behringers thing), they actually went so far to initially attempt to release them in identical chassis to the ones they were ripping off (ie some in boss chassis, others in electroharmonix boxes) which is just bad form. they got sued into a cease and desist, but marketingwise the damage was done.

plus the dudes at electroharmonix are cool and have one of the cleanest track records ever in always doing their own thing and never stealing other peoples circuits, and also keeping prices v v reasonable (lets face it, it they made the big muff a $150 pedal tomorrow they'd still sell a bagazillion of them) so it angers me when other people decide to just cop their shit and build it overseas for a fast buck.

Didn't know that about ripping off stuff, the murky world of fx pedals...

I just want something cheap and nasty really. I'll check out some prices for the Cool Cat Fuzz, thanks

Hey there's one for £15 + 5 on Ebay, that'll do *watches

Didn't know that about Behringer, either. Same reason I've avoided Biyang shit.

oh btw that particular behringer is a little cleaner than most because app it is a clone of a boss fz2 which is out of production (and is a great pedal), so unless you are into taking an overarching moral stand, you can buy that one w/o guilt. construction leaves something to be desired (plastic chassis i think? def surfacemount soldered which means break it = throw it away), but if you are basically down for home use, it could be cool. i have an FZ2 and if they did an accurate copy, its a fantastic sounding pedal.

I'd probably be buying a second hand one off Ebay or something anyway so tbh not really going to be feeling too guilty. It's good to know some alternatives though just for shopping around a bit!

The Danelectro French Toast is a great little cheap fuzz that you can pick up on ebay for around £20. Not as rich or as full sounding as a Big Muff, but then it's not meant to be. It's somewhere between a Big Muff and a 60s buzzy distortion. Plenty of sustain and nice and sludgy. Has an octave up switch too, which is fun to engage if you're looking to play some really nasty solos.

what pedal should i get if i wanted to sound like robert fripp on (no pussyfooting)?

so far i've come up with:

burns buzzaround clone
one of the big muffs
guild foxey lady

these all seem like fairly expensive boutique pedals

what is the best of the big muff pedals?

anything else worth a look? doesn't necessarily have to be analog, as long as it has a nice rich sustain

i have and love this one

http://www.vfepedals.com/VFE_Pedals/5_00_Fuzz.html

best of the big muffs that can be had for reasonable amounts of money is def the big muff w/tone wicker.

hmmm been listening to demos all day and the big muff's seem a little too heavy for what i'm after

if you listen to fripp's sound on no pussyfooting and some of his solos on the eno records, it's very sustained to the point of soft feedback with a very slight fuzziness to it, but never full on distortion, more of a soft clip. but really really warm (i know part of his sound is to do with the guitar he was using and how he set up the tone)

any recommendations along those lines?

is there any sort of basic waveshaping pedal that, for lack of a better description, is capable of turning something like the top signal in this diagram into something like the bottom signals?

http://i26.tinypic.com/2886ts1.jpg

I love the harmonic effect that is produced by using this type of distortion but right now I can only do it through code. I'd love to have a pedal that does this. idk if this sort of thing is easy to engineer though.

can you link some sound samples? my audio brain doesn't connect w/my tech dude brain all that well sometimes

ok I just made this really quick in MATLAB:

http://www.zshare.net/audio/78588812ac2a9b3c/

the tones in order:
-440 Hz sine wave
-440 Hz sine wave + 660 Hz sine wave (perfect fifth)
-440 Hz sine wave shaped like the middle graph
-440 Hz sine wave + 660 Hz sine wave shaped like the middle graph
-440 Hz sine wave shaped like the bottom graph
-440 Hz sine wave + 660 Hz sine wave shaped like the bottom graph

basically the shaping equation w/input parameter P would be abs(signal)^P x sign(signal). sort of like a generalized, sign-maintaining version of cubing the signal or raising the signal to some other odd power.

i was pretty torn between this guy, this guy (which i used to own and love), but googling reveals that the whole tweed sounds is something of a rage these days? i'm almost mad i have so many options.

^insert "and" where apropriate

ah sorry drut i haven't had time to pay attention to that since you made it, will try to take a look tomorrow some time

uh did my shit just autocorrect crut to drut wtf

tut tut

is there a reason why pedals that let you alter the characteristics with software are so expensive?
(i.e. more expensive than a cheap laptop, where presumably you could load matlab and connect it to mic input)

digital signal processing requires a lot of CPU power? idk.

what i mean is couldn't they just strip down a laptop, add a 1/4" input jack, and sell that as a pedal? (for presumably less than the DSP ones)

I can't do this live in MATLAB. I can only take an array of WAV data and run it through a function to produce another array of WAV data.

Have you tried PD or jesusonic?

i mean this is $300, cheap laptop might be $250.
http://howleraudio.com/wiki/skins/common/images/wiki.png

I wouldn't have thought a lappy that cost $250 would be powerful enough to process live sound (could be completely wrong though), and you'd need to spend up on a dece sound interface as well.

there's some latency for sure, but if you're only running the audio program, and strip out almost everything else...
is it crucial to have a souped up sound board?

http://img3.musiciansfriend.com/dbase/pics/products/regular/0/7/2/692072.jpg

this is a dope mind bogglingly inexpensive pedal that actually made my knees melt when i played octaves w/tremolo

hmmmmmmm interesting, they've been really beating down our door trying to get us to stock that series but i haven't heard one yet. must investigate further i guess.

yeah man i called the boutique shops in town and everybody i've talked to is like "we were really impressed by them, but we didn't order any" and i was like >:[

but i found a dude that got all of em at once (!!!!) and played em and omg mine is on the way via internets

What fuzz should I get for my keyboard (toy casio type affair)?

Is it really necessary? My experience is that the output of one of those small Casio keyboards is loud enough to overload the input on an amp by itself.

Well, seeing as I'm usually playing into a PA/DI, it is.

Want something to give it some texture, not just overload an input in clipping.

Going to give a Devi Ever Soda Meiser a go.

In that case you want some crazy fuzz. So something like a Big Muff or a Fuzz Face clone isn't going to cut it. Soda Meiser or something like it would be a good place to start. Or maybe a fuzz with a built in octave up, or a Green Ringer type circuit.